Turning Post USA founder Charlie Kirk defended Twitter on Thursday following multiple reports that the social media platform is allegedly “shadow banning” some users.
“Sometimes I actually might defend Twitter more than most conservatives because it is a massive company with a ton of people,” Kirk told Hill.TV co-hosts Buck Sexton and Krystal Ball on “Rising.”
{mosads}“There’s far, far left-wing people that are definitely agenda-driven and then there are some fair, decent-minded individuals there,” Kirk added.
Kirk says that he has personally benefited from the platform and doesn’t want to be a hypocrite. The conservative boasts more than 640,000 followers on Twitter.
“In this case there’s definitely someone who has been using political bias … but I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me,” Kirk said.
Kirk thinks the real focus needs to be on verified accounts, which are marked by a blue badge that lets people know that the account is authentic.
“I would think the bigger critique is who they verify and who they don’t,” Kirk told Hill.TV. “That’s actually where I think the energy should be focused.”
Liberal Igor Volsky agreed.
Volsky, the deputy director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said “there needs to be more transparency.”
On Thursday, President Trump accused Twitter of shadow banning prominent conservatives and threatened to investigate Twitter for the “discriminatory and illegal practice.”
Shadow banning essentially involves limiting an account’s visibility in search results.
Twitter has neither confirmed nor denied the practice.
But Twitter’s product lead, Kayvon Beykpour, said that in May the company started using “behavioral signals and machine learning to reduce people’s ability to detract from healthy public conversation on Twitter.” He said that this practice isn’t influenced by “political views or the substance of tweets.”
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